If you harbor any doubts that “conservative” is an all-purpose epithet in the press, then Simon Denyer, the Washington Post’s China bureau chief, will happily erase those doubts. Writing last week about threats to freedom of speech and scholarly inquiry in the former British colony of Hong Kong (“In Hong Kong, fears of Chinese restrictions on academic freedom grow,” March 15), he made it clear where the problem lies: It’s the People’s Republic of China “and its conserv-ative backers in Hong Kong” who want to censor speech and shut down academic freedom.
Never mind, of course, that the People’s Republic of China—or Red China, as we unreconstructed types used to call it—is stepping up its commitment to Marxist ideology, to Communist principles, and to the doctrines of its founder (and sometime left-wing hero) Mao Zedong. According to Denyer, the enemies of personal liberty, free speech, and intellectual inquiry in Hong Kong are on the right, not the left. He tells us that Hong Kong’s Communist governor, Leung Chun-ying, “is accused of appointing supporters and conservative figures to university governing councils,” and that “academics are concerned that China and its conservative backers in Hong Kong are trying to . . . rein in criticism and silence a source of unrest.”
The Scrapbook assumes that Denyer, the former Reuters bureau chief in Washington, is aware that “conservatives” are, in fact, the people who don’t like Marxism, call themselves anti-Communist, are appalled by restrictions on freedom of speech on campus, were worried when Britain handed Hong Kong over to Beijing (1997)—and regard the People’s Republic of China as a long-term threat to American freedom and security.
To our knowledge, the people who like Beijing and revile Taiwan are called liberals, and the people who think Hong Kong would have been better off under continued British rule are called conservatives. But not by Simon Denyer’s reckoning, and he and his colleagues are consistent on the point.
For example, the hard-line, anti-American Islam-ists who have governed Iran since 1979 are “conservatives” to the Simon Denyers of the world—even though “conservatives” are the Americans who oppose the Obama administration’s appeasement of Iran. Indeed, this rhetorical sleight-of-hand is nothing new: In the days of the old Soviet Union, it was “conservatives” in the Kremlin who suppressed political freedom and opposed free markets, while liberals in America favored appeasing Moscow. A mirror image, as it were, of the truth.
But the point, then as now, was not to clarify meaning, or depict reality, but to enshrine political prejudice in journalism. Liberals are the Good Guys in the media serial, while conservatives, under any and all circumstances, are just plain Bad. And who cares if Truth must be twisted and turned? If the Beijing leftists/Communists/Marxists prevail in Hong Kong, it will be the fault of conservatives!
